«Heroes: Mortals and Myths in Ancient Greece» exhibition in NY inaugurated by culture minister

Greece’s culture and tourism minister Pavlos Geroulanos on Tuesday evening inaugurated the exhibition: “Heroes: Mortals and Myths in Ancient Greece” hosted by the Alexandros Onassis Public Benefit Foundation at its Cultural Center in Manhattan. The exhibition, which was initially presented at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, opened to the public on October 5 and will run through January 3, 2011, and admission is free.
Mythical heroes and heroines like Hercules, Odysseus (Ulysses), Achilles and Helen of Troy, among others, continue to inspire modern culture, with the exhibition venturing to explore the inherent human need for heroes by making it relevant to today’s society, according to the organisers.
The exhibition has been organised by the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore in cooperation with the First Center for Visual Arts in Nashville, the San Diego Museum of Art and the Onassis Foundation (USA).
The age-old figures of Herakles, Odysseus, Achilles and Helen of Troy continue to fire the popular imagination today – and so does the concept of heroes, which began with the stories and images of these and other fabled Greek characters. Yet the very word “hero” has a different meaning in our society than it did in an ancient Greek world that seemed, to its people, to be alive with Greek heroes and heroines. To provide a better understanding of the lives, fates and meanings of the first heroes and heroines, to explore the inherent human need for heroes and to give audiences an opportunity to measure their own ideas of heroes against the ideas represented by a wealth of extraordinary Classical Greek artworks, the Onassis Cultural Center in Midtown Manhattan presents the exhibition Heroes: Mortals and Myths in Ancient Greece, on view from October 5, 2010 to January 3, 2011.
The exhibition brings together more than 90 exceptional artworks focusing on the Archaic, Classical and the Hellenistic period (6th-1st century BC), drawn from collections in the United States and Europe. Through these objects, which range from large-scale architectural sculptures to beautifully decorated pottery and miniature carved gemstones, the exhibition shows how the ancient Greek heroes were understood and how they served as role-models. It also explores this human need for heroes as role models through the arts of one of the oldest and most influential civilizations in history.

Highlights of the exhibition include a bronze Corinthian helmet from 700-500 B.C. (The Walters Art Museum); black-figure amphora depicting Achilles and Ajax playing a board game outside Troy (late 6th century B.C., Royal Ontario Museum); a black-figure column krater (c. 510 B.C.) depicting Odysseus escaping from the cave of the cyclops Polyphemos (Badisches Landesmuseum Karlsruhe); a marble sculpture of the torso of an heroic athlete (Roman copy after an original by Polykleitos, c. 430 B.C., The Walters Art Museum); a sculpture of Herakles as a beardless youth, based on a Hellenistic model (first or second century A.D., Staatliche Museen zu Berlin); a marble sculpture of the head of Polyphemos (first or second century A.D., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston); a marble relief sculpture of scenes from the Trojan War (first half of the first century A.D., The Metropolitan Museum of Art); and a gold medallion with the bust of Alexander the Great (c. 218-235 A.D., The Walters Art Museum).
In inaugurating the exhibition, Geroulanos lauded the “important role” played by the Onassis Foundation in showcasing and projecting the elements that comprise the Greek cultural heritage.
Today’s reality, he continued, is characterised by a multitude of problems and challenges, and noted the need to seek knowledge and values that “stem from our history, our myths, our heroes”, and put forward the questions: “Who are today’s heroes? What values do they represent?”

He also stressed the necessity, in this era of globalisation and economic crisis, to look to our cultural roots, our ancient civilisation, our heroes, in order to find our values, founded on knowledge, dialogue and humanism”.
Main opposition New Democracy (ND) vice-president and former tourism minister Dimitris Avramopoulos underlined the timeless contribution of the heroes of Ancient Greece.